Monday, March 5, 2012

Super Tuesday Looking Good for Romney

A slew of polls were released
on the eve of sorta-Super Tuesday. It’s
not quite the stellar lineup originally planned. Texas pushed its primary back to May because
of Congressional redistricting hiccups and Virginia is already in the Mitt
Romney column because Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich failed to qualify for the
ballot there. Regardless, the signs
point to the inevitability of a Romney nomination if he does well on March 6.

The polling aggregators at both
Real Clear Politics and Huffington Post show the closely watched state of Ohio
as a dead heat. However, the trend
lines clearly show Romney gaining and Santorum dropping over the past
week. And as we saw last week in
Michigan, that trend was predictive of the final outcome.

Importantly, the March 6
primaries feature the two most socially conservative states to hold contests
thus far. These are states where
Santorum was expected to do well, but he now clings to a 2 to 3 point lead in
Tennessee. Even in Oklahoma, his poll
lead has fallen from around 20 points to 10 in the few polls conducted over the
past month.

In the 2008 Republican
primaries, two-thirds of voters from Tennessee and Oklahoma called themselves
Evangelical Christians, among the highest concentration in the country. Furthermore, more than 4-in-10 GOP primary
voters in these two states said it mattered a great deal to them that a
candidate shares their religious beliefs.

These are the voters who have
been reticent to back Romney. Forget
about the exit poll analysis you have seen claiming that Romney’s weakness is
strong conservatives or strong Tea Party supporters. Those groups are important, but when you
strip away the political and demographic characteristics of these groups, the
one thing that differentiates their vote choice is whether they are evangelicals.

It’s the Mormon thing. Romney’s faith may be a sticking point with
Protestants, but it doesn’t really bother Catholics. It’s little surprise that Romney has won
every state where Catholics (or Catholics plus Mormons) made up at least 30% of
the electorate.

Other than Massachusetts and
Vermont, Ohio is the only state in the Super Tuesday lineup where the Catholic
vote is expected to top 25%. [Idaho’s
caucuses should have a sizable Mormon vote.]
This looks good for Romney.

It also helps that Santorum’s
appeal to blue collar voters fell short in Michigan and looks to do so again in
Ohio. And Ohio, like Tennessee, has a
significant number of voters who cast their ballots early. The Romney campaign has proven itself
effective at pumping up the early vote. In
the end, I think Romney will win Ohio by about 4 or 5 points.

But that’s still not enough to
get the Romney inevitability train up to speed.
It’ll be what happens in Tennessee and Oklahoma that determines whether
the storyline turns to WHEN rather than IF Romney will clinch. I think Santorum will take Tennessee by 3 or 4
points and Oklahoma by 12. But if Romney
performs well among the large group of evangelical voters who turn out –
picking up at least one-third of that vote – it will be a clear sign that this
hold-out group has finally started to accept the idea of Mitt Romney as their
standard bearer in November.